I bought this book in September 2017, wrote a rather critical blog post about it in April 2018 ("Awareness is a process, not a thing") and recently read a couple of additional chapters that make me feel considerably more positive about the book.

Here's some highlights from those chapters, which describe what happened when the brains of some highly experienced meditators, both Buddhist monks and others, were examined through modern scientific devices: EEG and fMRI. The key theme here is Open Presence.

Researchers found that the brain waves of Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan monk, were off the charts when it came to his ability to almost instantly enter a state of compassionate meditation. But those spikes diminished, yet didn't disappear, when he went into a rest period. Thus his brain had acquired a lasting trait, not just the ability to enter into temporary states of consciousness.

When another researcher tested whether Mingyur could generate an elaborate visual image or had extrasensory perception, he flunked both tests. Here's a passage from Altered Traits about this.

Mingyur, it turned out, had done no practice with visualization since the long-gone, early years of his practice. As time went on, his meditations evolved. His current method, ongoing open presence (which expressed itself as kindness in everyday life), encourages letting go of any and all thoughts rather than generating any specific visual images.

...As for "extrasensory perception," Mingyur had never claimed to have such supernormal powers. Indeed, the texts of his tradition made clear that any fascination with such abilities was a detour, a dead end on the path.

Which is exactly my experience, though I make no claim to being anywhere near as experienced with meditation as Mingyur is. What we're trying to do in meditation is experience reality as it is, not as religious fantasies make it out to be.

An eighteenth-century Tibetan text urges meditators to practice "on whatever harms come your way," adding, "When sick, practice on that sickness... When cold, practice on that coldness. By practicing in this way all situations will arise as meditation."

...Mingyur Rinpoche, likewise, encourages making all sensation, even pain, our "friend," using it as a basis for meditation. Since the essence of meditation is awareness, any sensation that anchors attention can be used as support -- and pain can be very effective in focusing.

...Each yogi (including Mingyur) was compared to a meditation-naive volunteer matched for age and gender. For a week before they came to be studied, the volunteers learned to generate an "open presence," an attentional stance of letting whatever life presents us come and go, without adding thoughts or emotional reactions. Our senses are fully aware, and we just stay aware of what happens without getting carried away by any downs or ups.

When the yogis and volunteers were tested to see how they reacted to a 10-second slight warming of a firey device, followed by a 10-second blast of hotness, the control groups' pain matrix in the brain reacted almost as strongly to the slight warming as it did when the high heat came on.

So their "anticipatory anxiety" caused them distress even before the real pain arrived. By contrast, the experienced meditators showed little change when the plate warmed just a little.

Interestingly, though:

But during the actual moments of intense heat the yogis had a surprising heightened response, mainly in the sensory areas that receive the genuine feel of a stimulus -- the tingling, pressure, high heat, and other raw sensations on the skin of the wrist where the hot plate rested. The emotional regions of the pain matrix activated a bit, but not as much as the sensory circuitry.

This suggests a lessening of the psychological component -- like the worry we feel in anticipation of pain -- along with intensification of the pain sensations themselves. Right after the heat stopped, all the regions of the brain matrix rapidly returned down to their levels before the pain cue, far more quickly than was the case for the controls.

For the highly advanced meditators, the recovery from pain was almost as though nothing much had happened at all.

Pretty inspiring. This shows that the human brain/mind is capable of more than most people are able to express, or experience. Yet this capacity isn't supernatural, divine, or godly. Here's some final quotes from Altered Traits.

We can only make conjectures about what state of consciousness this reflects: yogis like Mingyur seem to experience an ongoing state of open, rich awareness during their daily lives, not just when they meditate. The yogis themselves have described it as a spaciousness and vastness in their experience, as if all their senses were wide open to the full rich panorama of experience.

Or, as a fourteenth-century Tibetan text describes it,

...a state of bare, transparent awareness.

Effortless and brilliantly vivid, a state of relaxed, rootless wisdom;

Fixation free and crystal clear, a state without the slightest reference point;

Spacious empty clarity, a state-wide-open and unconfined; the senses unfettered...

January 29, 2019

My wife, Laurel, is an avid atheist -- even more so in some respects than I am. She started a MeetUp group here in Salem, Oregon: Freethinking Atheists of Salem. Here's the description of the group.

Are you too logical/rational to believe in religions, conspiracy theories, and beliefs not supported by modern science, yet miss the fellowship church-goers enjoy? Let's meet up monthly for coffee to converse with like-minded people who also share minority status as "nonbelievers" in a predominantly religious believing world.

Let's share what we learn about science, the challenges of being atheists, and support each other in what we know to be supported by reality. We ask for about a one dollar donation to cover the MeetUp cost, and that you support the IKE Box's hospitality by purchasing a drink or snack.

Last night Laurel used the public comment period at a Salem City Council meeting to talk about her concern that a minister called for prayer prior to Mayor Chuck Bennett giving the annual "State of the City" address.

Yes, the Mayor's talk wasn't held in a government building, but it was part of his official mayoral duties. As Laurel says in the video below, church and state are supposed to be separated in the United States. Having a Christian minister issue a call for prayer elevates one religion above others.

And also, of course, above the 30% or so of people in Oregon who don't embrace any religion, or God. Yet the minister ends his invocation/prayer with "In Jesus' name."

There's absolutely no reason why people who choose to attend a secular event should have to listen to religious talk.

I'm glad my wife made this point to the Mayor and City Council. Hopefully next year there won't be any religious invocation. Or if there is, that it feature a representative of a different faith than Christianity.

January 27, 2019

Ego. "I'm especially good-looking/intelligent/talented/etc. etc."Love of country. "I'm a citizen of the greatest nation in the world."Luck. "I won the lottery and now I'm set for life."Upbringing. "My parents always told me I was special."

But religions are one of the biggest purveyors of specialness. Which makes them especially dangerous. Why? Because feeling special sets us apart from all of those other non-special people who are so obviously inferior.

Maybe this statement seems paradoxical to you: I feel more genuinely spiritual now that I've stopped believing in God.

But it makes good sense to me. Here's the main reason why.

I no longer feel special.

Virtually every religion and spiritual path considers that its adherents have a special relationship with God or whatever other supernatural entity they believe in.

There are so many chosen people on Earth, they vastly outnumber the unchosen, the non-special group I'm pleased to be a part of.

I understand that feeling special has its own delights.

In my case, I was a member of an India-based spiritual organization which taught that those approved for initiation by the guru had been "marked" to return to God/heaven after a karma-cleansing meditation process.

Cool!

For about 35 years I embraced the enjoyable belief that, out of all the billions of people on this planet, I was one of a relative few who were the special beloveds of the supreme being.

Of course, devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims feel the same way, along with countless believers in other theological belief systems.

Eventually I started to realize that all the talk I was hearing about being "humble servants of the Lord and the guru" was, to put it bluntly, a crock of shit. Genuine humility wasn't much to be seen among devotees of my spiritual organization.

Not surprising.

Since members of this group were told over and over that they've been singled out by a higher power to learn cosmic truths and experience realms of reality not available to other human beings, naturally a pervading sense of "tribal" pride was evident throughout the organization.

We were the cool kids in the spiritual lunch room. Other faiths were inferior, since they didn't have the direct connection to God we did.

I'm happy that this form of egotism has been discarded.

Sure, I've still got lots of other self-centered tendencies rattling around in my psyche, as we all do. But to get rid of The Big One, a belief that God had chosen me to be his best buddy for eternity, whereas my infidel wife wasn't going to get the same afterlife prize -- this increased my humility quotient by a lot.

Now I don't expect that I'm going to have any different sort of afterlife anyone else does. Namely, I strongly suspect, none at all.

If you want more motivation to discard a religiosity that is making you feel special, check out some other blog posts I've written on this subject:

January 25, 2019

If you listen to CNN for more than a few minutes, especially if Wolf Blitzer is the anchor, you're guaranteed to hear "Breaking news!"

Of course, usually it isn't genuine breaking news that hasn't been reported before, but rather fairly fresh news that I'd heard before, though not a whole lot.

When was the last time, though, that you recall hearing breaking news about God?

I'll provide the answer: never. Not once in my lifetime, all 70 years of it, has there been a credible story about some new divine revelation from the Big Guy/Gal upstairs in heaven.

For some reason -- and I'm pretty sure I know what this is -- all of the breaking news about God stopped being broadcast many hundreds of years ago, if not thousands.

Today I was walking down three flights of stairs after a meeting of the Salem City Club. A woman slightly ahead of me on the top landing stepped to the side and said, "Go on by. I'm as slow as Moses."

Showing that I'm pretty much clueless about the Bible, I said to the woman and her husband as I walked past them, "What makes Moses so slow?" They gave me a quick Old Testament lesson about how it took Moses forty years to get his people to the promised land, if I recall what they said semi-correctly.

That got me to thinking about the Ten Commandments and other godly subjects.

Why have messages from God dried up now that the Old and New Testaments have been written, along with the Koran and other holy books such as the Adi Granth Sahib, Bhagavad Gita, and so on?

It doesn't seem to be a coincidence that with the rise of science, there's been an almost total decline in miracles. Now that miraculous events can be critically questioned and examined through the microscope of logic, reason, and demonstrable evidence, they've dried up.

Which leads me to conclude that either God is afraid to have his communications tested for veracity, or God doesn't exist. I'm going with the latter theory, being the most believable.

So the next time you pick up a newspaper, listen to the radio, or turn on a TV, ponder the fact that there's no new news about God. Which is pretty damn strange, given that religious believers consider that God is the ultimate reality, the power behind creation, the source of all that is good.

A lengthy silence can be construed either as the absence of an entity capable of making noise, or as a willful desire to not communicate one's presence.

The first possibility points to atheism being true. The second possibility points to some form of deism where God chooses to absent himself/herself/itself from the world. Both are far removed from what most religious people believe.

Yeah, I know. This truth is painful. But it must be told. There's no news about God because either God doesn't exist, or God doesn't care about us. So get on with your life and pay attention to all the other news about things that are real.

January 22, 2019

Chasing after perfection is a perfect way to drive yourself crazy. Or at least, to become deeply disappointed -- since perfection doesnt exist.

Not in people, for sure. And likely nowhere else, either.

Yet religions hold up perfection as an attainable ideal. For example, they speak of having perfect faith, as if this was possible. And I'm well aware of Eastern religions that consider a perfect living guru is the next best thing to a perfect god.

So when I heard about a book that describes the wisdom of embracing imperfection, I immediately ordered it.

Here's some excerpts from the first chapters of Wabi Sabi. Almost certainly I'll have more to say about the book as I get further into it.

Almost without exception, conversations I have had with Japanese people on this topic have begun with: "Wabi Sabi? Hmmmm... It's very difficult to explain." And the truth is, most people have never tried to articulate it and don't see the need to do so. They have grown up with it. It's how they navigate the world and appreciate beauty. It is built into who they are.

...In slowly peeling back the layers of mystery, this is what I have come to understand: the true beauty of wabi wabi lies not in things but in the very nature of life itself.

Wabi sabi is an intuitive response to beauty that reflects the true nature of life.

Wabi sabi is an acceptance and appreciation of the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete nature of everything.

Wabi sabi is a recognition of the gifts of simple, slow, and natural living.

Wabi sabi is a state of the heart. It is a deep in-breath and a slow exhale. It is felt in a moment of real appreciation -- a perfect moment in an imperfect world. We can nurture it with our willingness to notice details and cultivate delight. And we experience it when we are living the most authentic, most inspired versions of ourselves.

It's about experiencing the world by truly being in it rather than judging it from the sidelines. It's about allowing strategy to give way to sensitivity. It's about taking the time to pay attention.

The principles that underlie wabi sabi can teach us life lessons about letting go of perfection and accepting ourselves just as we are.

...Wabi sabi is a feeling, and it is intangible. One person's wabi sabi is not the same as another's, because each of us experiences the world in different ways.

We feel wabi sabi when we come into contact with the essence of authentic beauty -- the kind that is unpretentious, imperfect, and all the better for that. This feeling is prompted by a natural beauty, that which is austere and unadorned.

...Put simply, wabi sabi gives you permission to be yourself.

It encourages you to do your best but not make yourself ill in pursuit of an unattainable goal of perfection. It gently motions you to relax, slow down, and enjoy your life. And it shows you that beauty can be found in the most unlikely of places, making every day a doorway to delight.

January 21, 2019

Last Saturday there was another Women's March here in Salem, Oregon. As I did with the 2017 and 2018 marches, I took a bunch of photos, then shared them in an Adobe Spark web page that you can peruse by clicking on the image below.

There were some Christian fundamentalist counter-protestors at the event on the Capitol Mall.

I'll share a photo of their signs, along with my commentary on one of the signs below the Adobe Spark link. Or you can view the photo and my comment on it by clicking on the Women's March Salem 2019 link.

Caution: if you're an avid fan of President Trump, be prepared to see many photos of signs that vilify him.

The "cover girl" (or cover woman) on the web page is my wife, Laurel. She's also an avid atheist who has organized a MeetUp group that convenes every Sunday to support people in the irreligiosity.

Here's the photo of the fundamentalist Christians, along with my commentary.

Here's a closeup of the Christian fundamentalist hate signs. Pleasingly, I'm guilty of all of the "sins" in the sign on the left: I accept abortion, multiple religions, marijuana, porn, alcohol, and same sex relationships. Also, how could these guys be against fornicators? Do they think they're the product of a virgin birth? Me, I'm fine with hell fire, since I'm a proud evolutionist.

January 18, 2019

Why? Because the very notion of supernaturalism is crazy, since there is zero, repeat zero, demonstrable evidence that gods, angels, souls, heaven, hell, or any other supernatural entity exists.

When I was younger I used to believe that Hinduism was a bit more appealing than, say, Christianity, because it wasn't as dogmatic a religion. However, as I began reading about Hindu nationalism in India, I came to realize that many fundamentalist Hindus are just as crazy as their counterparts in other religions.

KOCHI, India — One morning this month, Bindu Ammini stood at the base of a steep, forested trail in southern India and looked up: She was a three-mile hike away from making history.

Two hours later, at 3:45 a.m., Ms. Ammini and a friend became the first women to enter the Sabarimala Temple, a centuries-old Hindu shrine, after India’s Supreme Court struck down a longstanding rule preventing women of menstruating age from visiting.

In the wake of that ruling, a dozen women tried in October to climb a slippery path leading to the temple. None of them made it, as men screamed in their faces and hurled coconuts.

Video of Ms. Ammini’s journey on Jan. 2 shows two women in long black gowns striding through a gilded archway. They maneuver past mostly placid men. “Our visit has been very smooth,” Ms. Ammini, 40, says to the camera.

Protesters in the state of Kerala, where the shrine is, threw crude bombs at the police. Over 3,000 people were arrested. At least one person was killed. Dozens more were injured.

Within hours of the women’s trip, a priest had shut down the Sabarimala Temple to sprinkle water for a “purification ritual,” evidence to some that the ban was rooted in a belief that menstruating women were dirty.

Wow. This story makes Christianity look positively tame in comparison to Hinduism. Christians believe in a lot of unbelievable stuff, but at least they aren't prone to rioting when someone supposedly defiles a holy place.

And while the Biblical god can be nasty, at least that divinity doesn't discriminate against women of menstruating age.

Every year, millions of people wait for hours to climb the 18 gold-plated steps leading to the Sabarimala Temple, one of Hinduism’s holiest shrines. For centuries, however, pilgrims say they have observed a de facto bar against women between the ages of 10 and 50, thinking that to allow menstruating women inside would disturb the temple’s celibate deity, Lord Ayyappa.

I found the last part of the New York Times story inspiring. It takes a lot of courage to stand up against religious extremism. I admire the women in India who are doing this.

New challenges await the women. The Supreme Court plans to consider review petitions, though lawyers do not expect a reversal of the verdict. Earlier this week, after the women left a safe house, Ms. Kanakadurga’s mother-in-law beat her so badly with a piece of wood, she said, that she was hospitalized.

Ms. Ammini said she was realistic about her safety, fretting about a recent ominous “silence” in Kerala. But the way forward — “to serve the society, work with Dalits, women, for blacks” — had never been plainer or more urgent, she said.

“They may attack me, they may kill me, but I feel no fear,” she said. “I am struggling for existence.”

January 16, 2019

Following up on my previous post about John Dewey's marvelous little book, "A Common Faith," here's some of what Dewey has to say about mystical experiences. I've boldfaced some passages that particularly appeal to me.

Dewey's main point, which I totally agree with, is that by themselves, mystical experiences prove nothing about God or the supernatural.

The possible causes of those experiences must be carefully studied before any conclusions can be drawn about them, especially given the wide variety of mystical experiences, many or most of which have no commonality.

Dewey writes:

It is more to the point, however, to consider the region that is claimed by religionists as a special reserve. It is mystical experience. The difference, however, between mystic experience and the theory about it that is offered to us must be noted.

The experience is a fact to be inquired into. The theory, like any theory, is an interpretation of that fact.

The idea that by its very nature the experience is a veridical [truthful] realization of the direct presence of God does not rest so much upon examination of the facts as it does upon importing into their interpretation a conception that is formed outside them.

In its dependence upon a prior conception of the supernatural, which is the thing to be proved, it begs the question.

History exhibits many types of mystic experience, and each of these types is contemporaneously explained by the concepts that prevail in the culture and the circle in which the phenomena occur.

There are mystic crises that arise, as among some North American Indian tribes, induced by fasting. They are accompanied by trances and semi-hysteria. Their purpose is to gain some special power, such perhaps as locating a person who is lost or finding objects that have been secreted.

There is the mysticism of Hindoo practice now enjoying some vogue in Western countries. There is the mystic ecstasy of Neoplatonism with its complete abrogation of the self and absorption into an impersonal whole of Being.

There is the mysticism of intense aesthetic experience independent of any theological or metaphysical interpretation. There is the heretical mysticism of William Blake. There is the mysticism of sudden unreasoning fear in which the very foundations seem shaken beneath one -- to mention but a few of the types that may be found.

What common element is there between, say, the Neoplatonic conception of a super-divine Being wholly apart from human needs and conditions and the medieval theory of an immediate union that is fostered through attention to the sacraments or through concentration upon the heart of Jesus?

...There is no reason for denying the existence of experiences that are called mystical. On the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that, in some degree of intensity, they occur so frequently that they may be regarded as normal manifestations that take place at certain rhythmic points in the movement of experience.

The assumption that denial of a particular interpretation of their objective content proves that those who make the denial do not have the experience in question, so that if they had it they would be equally persuaded of its objective source in the presence of God, has no foundation in fact.

As with every empirical phenomenon, the occurrence of the state called mystical is simply an occasion for inquiry into its mode of causation. There is no more reason for converting the experience itself into an immediate knowledge of its cause than in the case of an experience of lightning or any other natural occurrence.

Sure, we also think about all kinds of stuff. The structures we build are more impressive than a termite hill. Our social relationships are more complex than a wolf pack.

Yet the fact remains, we are animals.

One reason I've come to reject religions is that almost all of them deny our animalistic nature. Religious moral codes are filled with ridiculous attempts to ignore the needs and urges of the human body.

Sex is supposed to only occur between a married man and woman. Not out of wedlock. Not between two people of the same gender. (And certainly not between more than two people, regardless of gender.)

Alcohol is OK in certain religions, though not in others. Recreational drugs like marijuana or psychedelics rarely are. Why? Who knows. Probably because of bullshit like "the body is a temple that must be kept clean and holy."

Other animals enjoy being intoxicated. But only the human animal feels guilty about it, mostly thanks to ignorant religious dogmas.

For 35 years I bought into some of that body-denying dogma, Eastern mysticism variety.

I didn't drink alcohol. I didn't use marijuana or any other drugs. I kept my sexual urges within the confines of marriage. But after I got divorced in 1990 from my first wife, and then "divorced" from my religion in 2004, I loosened up.

I realized that life needs to be lived happily, not fearfully.

I stopped worrying about following commandments and rules that no longer made sense to me. I enjoyed sex with my eventual wife-to-be. I enjoyed a glass of wine. I enjoyed smoking (or vaping) marijuans.

Nothing bad happened to me. No thunderbolts rained down from the sky. The heavens didn't part to reveal a god proclaiming you are a sinner! I simply felt more relaxed, more human, more natural, and yes, more animalistic.

So if you're a religious believer who feels like you're being confined in a life-denying box, I highly recommend breaking out. Life is too short to live it anyway other than fully.

The oft-heard adage, among adherents of my previous religion, at least, is flat-out wrong. We aren't spiritual beings having a human experience. We are humans being deluded into pursuing dogmatic spiritual experiences.

Genuine spirituality gets contaminated by religiosity. There are no rules that can't be broken. Everyone who seeks the deeper meaning of life is an army of one. Once you allow yourself to follow in someone else's footsteps, you are unable to find your own way.

Spirituality isn't opposed to the body. It is part and parcel of it. Pleasure is holy. Denying our animalism is a sin against our true nature.

January 12, 2019

It seems that being all shook up typically is viewed as something to be avoided, since it means "greatly disturbed or upset." As in, watching that scary movie left me all shook up (shaken is the proper word, with shook being slang).

But I've been reading Michael Pollan's new book about psychedelics, "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Dying, Consciousness, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence."

In it he speaks of how sometimes our overly rigid psyche needs to be shaken up like a snow globe.

Yet it’s not entirely clear to the scientists what it is about these experiences that produce such profound changes in attitude, mood, and behavior.

Is it a sense of awe? Is it what the American philosopher William James called the “mystical experience,” something so overwhelming that it shatters the authority of everyday consciousness and alters our perception of the world? What’s clear in any case is that psychedelic trips are often beyond the bounds of language.

The best metaphor I’ve heard to describe what psychedelics does to the human mind comes from Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelic researcher at Imperial College in London. He said we should think of the mind as a ski slope. Every ski slope develops grooves as more and more people make their way down the hill. As those grooves deepen over time, it becomes harder to ski around them.

Like a ski slope, Carhart-Harris argues, our minds develop patterns as we navigate the world.

These patterns harden as you get older. After a while, you stop realizing how conditioned you’ve become — you’re just responding to stimuli in predictable ways. Eventually, your brain becomes what Michael Pollan has aptly called an “uncertainty-reducing machine,” obsessed with securing the ego and locked in uncontrollable loops that reinforce self-destructive habits.

Taking psychedelics is like shaking the snow globe, Carhart-Harris said.

It disrupts these patterns and explodes cognitive barriers. It also interacts with what’s called the default mode network (DMN), the part of the brain associated with mental chatter, self-absorption, memories, and emotions. Anytime you’re anxious about the future or fretting over the past, or engaged in compulsive self-reflection, this part of the brain lights up. When researchers looked at images of brains on psychedelics, they discovered that the DMN shuts down almost entirely.

Think of it this way: You spend your whole life in this body, and because you’re always at the center of your experience, you become trapped in your own drama, your own narrative.

But if you pay close attention, say, in a deep meditation practice, you’ll discover that the experience of self is an illusion. Yet the sensation that there’s a “you” separate and apart from the world is very hard to shake; it’s as though we’re wired to see the world this way.

The only time I’ve ever been able to cut through this ego structure is under the influence of psychedelics (in my case, ayahuasca).

I was able to see myself from outside my self, to see the world from the perspective of nowhere and everywhere all at once, and suddenly this horror show of self-regard stopped. And I believe I learned something about the world that I could not have learned any other way, something that altered how I think about, well, everything.

So as this passage shows, there's various ways to shake up the human mind.

Meditation is one way, an approach that I've followed since 1970, when I started my lifelong practice of meditating every day. Forty-eight years later I'm still at it, though I've switched from a mantra-based form of meditation to more of a mindfulness approach centered on following the breath while being aware of other sensations both within and without my mind.

Any other activity that demands or encourages present-moment attention also can lead to a lessening of our usual focus on ourselves, and how the self is being treated by the great big world that exists outside of our personal consciousness.

Sports, dancing, martial arts, Tai Chi, walking in nature -- I've found that these also are good means of lessening the feeling of being separate and distinct from the world.

But I agree with the author of the Vox story about psychedelics that substances such as psilocybin, LSD, and mescaline are especially powerful ways of shaking up the snow globe of our mind. Unlike other ways of doing this, all that's required is to ingest a small bit of a psychedelic substance and, voila, shaking happens!

I'm hoping that voters in Oregon, where I live, agree to legalize psilocybin in the 202o election. The Vox story mentions this. An Oregon Psilocybin Society Facebook post notes that the story isn't completely accurate about the legalization effort, and shared some clarifications.

Check out the Psilocybin Service Initiative of Oregon to learn more about the proposed ballot measure. The home page has a moving video of testimonials from people whose lives have been changed for the better by psilocybin.

Probably I'd be wary of trying psilocybin at my age (70), since I'm no longer the wild and crazy try-anything guy of my college years.

Plus, 1967-68, when I did most, if not all, of my experimenting with full-on psychedelics was a magical time, especially since I attended college in the San Francisco Bay area, hotbed of the Summer of Love, Haight-Asbury, and such.

January 09, 2019

Today the Daily Calm guided meditation by Tamara Levitt on my iPhone app was about mandalas. I've transcribed the last portion of what Levitt said, because I found it inspiring.

It's so true. Nothing lasts. Everything is impermanent. Our wanting to make the impermanent permanent isn't the only source of suffering, but it certainly contributes to our dissatisfaction with life.

The image below came from a web page about sand mandalas. It describes the process used to create them in the Buddhist tradition. Here's the transcript:

Today we’ll be discussing the transient nature of all things.

In Buddhism there is a tradition of making beautiful mandalas out of vibrantly colored sand. A mandala is a geometric work of art created on a large flat surface and composed of thousands of tiny deposits of colored sand arranged in a stunningly intricate pattern of concentric lines, curls, and shapes.

A mandala is meant to symbolize the complexity of the universe. And its creation is a meditation in itself.

Traditionally sand mandalas are carefully created by a group of monks often working over a span of many hours, typically taking days to complete. There’s a remarkable attention to detail and striking beauty. Yet as soon as the artists complete the mandala, they destroy it.

The stunning composition of brightly colored sand is ceremoniously brushed away and taken to a river to be carried off by the water. You might ask, why would the makers of a mandala exert such extraordinary effort into it, only to willfully destroy it.

Well, it is to remind themselves of the lesson of impermanence, that nothing lasts.

This lesson is contrary to human nature. Our instinct is to resist change. We try to keep our kids from growing up too fast. We fight a natural aging process. And we hold on to romantic relationships long after we’ve realized it’s best for us to move on.

But impermanence is an unavoidable law of nature.

And the more we resist change, the more difficult we make our lives. As Thich Nhat Hanh stated, it is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.

So keep the sand ceremony mandala in mind as a reminder to embrace the transient nature of life.

Do your best not to cling to the things you want to last. Rather, experience them as fully as you can, as they happen, and gracefully let them go as they naturally come to an end.

January 08, 2019

There was only one table unoccupied in the eating area, so I grabbed it. Not long after, a woman appeared, lunch plate in hand, and asked if she could sit with me. Naturally I said, "sure."

At first both of us started to look at our phones, the usual way to pass time these days, since simply eating without any distraction would be too damn boring.

But then she glanced at my pizza slice and opened up a conversation.

"Their gluten free pizzas have a nice thin crust. I prefer it to the crust on regular pizzas." That caused me to start talking about one of my favorite subjects, how so many people nowadays believe they are gluten-intolerant, even though science-based stories I've read say that actual gluten intolerance is quite rare.

As conversations go, ours wound around in a varied fashion. Eventually we arrived at the subject of vegetarianism.

I told the woman about how, when my daughter was young, six or seven maybe, she'd invite friends for a sleepover at our house. When we ate lunch or dinner, sometimes the children would ask if they could have a hamburger. My wife and I would explain that we were vegetarians and didn't believe in killing cows.

"What?! Hamburgers come from cows?," I remember hearing. I also recall a concerned mother phoning us after a sleepover, saying that their child is refusing to eat hamburger now, and wondering what we told the kid.

At some point in our conversation I extended the topic of vegetarianism into adult attitudes, noting that people will go to great lengths to save a kitten or baby duck trapped in a storm drain. These same people, though, have no problem eating chickens raised cruelly in factory farms.

"This is hypocritical," I said, even though upon reflection probably that wasn't the best word.

What I was getting at was that meateaters have some contradictory attitudes -- happily eating animals killed for food, on the one hand, and loving animals that aren't destined for a dinner plate, on the other hand.

The woman had told me that she eats meat, so I had a sense that my hypocrisy talk wasn't going over all that well. So I broadened the topic to include myself. "Of course, we all deny reality to some extent, me certainly included. Sometimes life is just too harsh to get through with a clear-eyed view of what's going on."

For sure.

If a loved one is hit with a terminal cancer diagnosis, we still hold out hope that they'll survive against all odds. Even though we've failed at numerous weight loss efforts, we still imagine that a new approach will create a svelte new me. After decades of seeing politicians make promises that fail to be kept, we still vote for candidates who proclaim, "I'll make a difference."

And notably, most people believe in the promise of religions even though there is no demonstrable evidence of God or the supernatural.

Why? In large part because almost all religions deny the reality of death. Instead of coming to grips with the finitude of human existence, this being our one and only life, religious believers embrace a fantasy of an eternity spent in heaven, enjoying the splendors of a supernatural realm.

It's hard for atheist me to argue against people doing this. Death is scary. It's natural for us humans to use our powerful brains to envision the possibility that dying is followed by another life, either here on Earth or in some divine realm.

If this was the sole foundation of religiosity -- a wish that death wasn't the end, but a new beginning -- those of us who criticize religions wouldn't have much reason to do so. After all, everybody embraces wishes and hopes that almost certainly won't come true, but help us get through difficult periods in our life.

The problem is that religions aren't judicious deniers of reality, to cite the title of this blog post. They are fervent, dogmatic, passionate deniers of reality. In addition to generally believing in life after death, religions promulgate all sorts of other untruths about the world.

Such as, to name an example I've been writing about on my Salem Political Snark blog, that same-sex marriage and same-sex sex are sins, being disapproved of by God (albeit without any evidence that God exists, or that God's likes and dislikes can be known).

So even though everybody fails to see reality precisely as it is, each of us having blind spots of some sort, there are degrees of reality-denying that need to be acknowledged. Religions often are so important to believers in them, those people come to see almost everything through a religious lens that seriously distorts the true nature of this world.

A little bit of religious fantasy is OK, however.

Today I couldn't help but notice that after the woman sat down at my table, she folded her hands and seemingly said a brief silent prayer before she started eating. Of course, for all I know she could have been Buddhist or Hindu, rather than Christian, since many faiths use folded hands as a sign of devotion.

I wasn't bothered at all by this. Heck, sometimes I'll do the hands-folded thing myself when I'm feeling particularly Buddhist, just to see how it feels. I'm not really a Buddhist. I just enjoy play-acting as one now and then.

January 06, 2019

Many things amuse me when I peruse comments on this Church of the Churchless blog by religiously-minded people.

One class of comments that generates an especially large smile is Brian, you spend all of your time bashing religion, so you're obviously obsessed.

When I see someone saying this, I know that just as they're prone to drawing inaccurate conclusions about the cosmos from biased beliefs, they also draw false conclusions about me from a very limited body of evidence -- my posts on this blog.

Actually, almost everybody is a complex mix of varied interests that include much more than religiosity, or the lack thereof.

(I'd leave off the almost, but maybe cloistered monks or nuns, to offer up a Christian example, really do eat and breathe religion 24/7.)

Me, I spend almost all of my time occupied with non-religious aspects of life.

When it comes to blogging, I have three blogs, and I try to give roughly equal time to each of them, though this depends on whether a hot topic demands that more time be given to HinesSight (personal blog), Church of the Churchless (this blog), or Salem Political Snark (politics and such).

I got to thinking about how varied my interests are in the course of recently putting together a JournoPortfolio site to showcase my writing, plus some of the videos and photo essays I've created.

Yesterday I wrote a post praising JournoPortfolio, "I'm loving JournoPortfolio. It's a writer's dream." In it I shared a link to the site I made -- which has some of my 5,839 blog posts (well, 5,840, counting this one), links to the books I've written, and the aforementioned videos and photo essays.

It was an interesting process, deciding which blog posts, videos, and photo essays I wanted to include on my JournoPortfolio site. Since I've been a prolific writer, obviously I had a lot of material to choose from. So what I had to do was ponder what I wanted to share as a sampling of my varied pursuits, passions, and such.

Of course, I realized that few people would actually visit the site.

So the question before me was really "Out of everything I could share, what comes closest to being how I'd like to be known?" Well, having written that last sentence, I realize it doesn't do a very good job of reflecting a feeling that is considerably more subtle than those words.

So here's another try.

Each of us, me included, has to decide how open and transparent we're going to be with other people and the Big Wide World outside of our cranium. We can't be a completely open book. We also can't be a completely hidden treasure. A balance has to be struck.

In choosing what to share on my JournoPortfolio site, I'd face choices such as... should I include my post about being seriously depressed? Or my mescaline use in college? Or my relationship with Conrad Hilton?

Part of me would think, How might people view me if I share this or that? And another part would think, It doesn't matter how they view me, what matters if whether what I share reflects an important part of my life.

That latter part would win the debate, since like most people, I'm a believer in being as truthful as I can, within reasonable bounds, of course.

(When the checkout person at a grocery store asks me, "How's your day going?," I always say something like "Pretty good," regardless of whether this is true. With a friend at a coffeeshop, though, I'll answer differently.)

Facebook has its problems, but I like how every person who posts on Facebook is expected to use their genuine identity -- no false names allowed. This helps remind me that when someone expresses a strong opinion on some subject, they're a complex human being with a wide variety of interests and beliefs, only some of which conflict with my view of the world.

Likewise, I enjoy it when commenters on this blog use their real names. I wish every commenter did. Just as with Facebook, this would remind us that religiosity, or the lack thereof, is just a part of peoples' lives, often a small part.

January 02, 2019

I'll be reading a book, then see a minor mention of another book in it, pass that mention by, then decide to flip back a few pages and revisit the mention again -- which sometimes leads me to a literary gem I never would have discovered on my own.

Such was the case with John Dewey's "A Common Faith." It's a short (80 pages, plus an introduction by someone else) sharing of lectures Dewey gave at Yale in 1934 on the subject of religion.

We tend to think of John Dewey as an educational reformer, but Wikipedia says "Although Dewey is known best for his publications about education, he also wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, art, logic, social theory, and ethics."

Well, his writing about religion was brilliant.

I'd like to share a bunch of quotes from his book, but what I want to do in this post is describe his basic message in A Common Faith with my own words. I finished the book this morning, so it is fairly fresh in my mind.

Dewey's core concept is distinguishing "religion" from "religious."

Religions almost always are founded on supernatural beliefs. This sets them apart from the rest of human experience and knowledge. Thus we need to recognize what is common both to religions and to everything else.

This is imagination. Not in the sense of wild-eyed fantasy, but in the sense of recognizing the difference between what is and what could be.

Such is what Dewey calls "religious."

He admits that using this term in such an unusual manner is going to irritate both lovers and haters of religion. The lovers won't like his new meaning of religious because it eliminates what for them is the essence of religiosity: belief in supernatural phenomena, including God, heaven, miracles, and such.

And haters of religion will object to giving any ground to religions, including a term, religious, that has meant someone who believes in a religion. Dewey, though, seems to feel that because most people in the world follow a religion, redefining the meaning of religious is the way to go.

He wants to end the division of human experience into, broadly speaking, that of (1) religions and (2) everything else.

In his view, and I agree with Dewey, the appeal of religions is that they profess broadly held aspirations such as love, charity, peace, bliss, contentment, wisdom, and so on -- yet claim that these imagined goods already exist in a perfect form.

Not here on Earth. In a supernatural sense.

Dewey strongly objects to this theological trick. He considers that this saps the will of humans to make this world a better place, since their attention is focused on following the tenets of a religion that promises heavenly delights after death, not in this life.

If the supernatural side of religions was done away with, this would free up a tremendous amount of energy to be religious -- pursuing the aforementioned exercise of imagination that envisions how progress can be made here on Earth. Like, alleviating poverty, ill health, lack of education, a dearth of artistry, community feeling.

What if, Dewey asks, people pursued bettering the lives of our fellow humans with the same zeal they devote to their religions? What if being religious -- committing to reducing the gap between what is and what could be -- came to be more important than being a devotee of the rites and rituals associated with a particular religion?

Again, the problem with religions is that they wrongly assume could be already exists in a supernatural realm.

Aside from being intellectually dishonest, since there is no convincing evidence of a supernatural side to existence, much less that it is filled with everything we humans long for, being told that the what is of this world doesn't matter much, because a better world awaits, causes religiosity to be divorced from other aspects of life.

Hence the title of Dewey's book: A Common Faith. What he is after with his redefining of "religious" is a universality of human striving that doesn't divide experience into what religions deal with, and everything else.

I guess I'll break my commitment to speak only in my own words and end with some passages from the book's final pages.

The community of causes and consequences in which we, together with those not born, are enmeshed is the widest and deepest symbol of the mysterious totality of being the imagination calls the universe.

It is the embodiment for sense and thought of that encompassing scope of existence the intellect cannot grasp. It is the matrix within which our ideal aspirations are born and bred. It is the source of the values that the moral imagination projects as directive criteria and as shaping purposes.

The continuing life of this comprehensive community of beings includes all the significant achievement of men in science and art and all the kindly offices of intercourse and communication. It holds within its content all the material that gives verifiable intellectual support to our ideal faiths.

A "creed" founded on this material will change and grow, but it cannot be shaken. What it surrenders it gives up gladly because of new light and not as a reluctant concession. What it adds, it adds because new knowledge gives further insight into the conditions that bear upon the formation and execution of our life purposes.

..."Agnosticism" is a shadow cast by the eclipse of the supernatural. Of course, acknowledgement that we do not know what we do not know is a necessity of all intellectual integrity. But generalized agnosticism is only a halfway elimination of the supernatural. Its meaning departs when the intellectual outlook is directed wholly to the natural world.

When it is so directed, there are plenty of particular matters regarding which we must say we do not know; we only inquire and form hypotheses which future inquiry will confirm or reject. But such doubts are an incident of faith in the method of intelligence.

They are signs of faith, not of a pale and impotent skepticism. We doubt in order that we may find out, not because some inaccessible supernatural lurks behind whatever we can know. The substantial background of practical faith in ideal ends is positive and outreaching.

...Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.